I'm not sure if you have seen these already, but I have noticed a few uses for some of your catalysts over the last year or so: A period-26 "dependent" reflector, and improvements to a p55 and p15 oscillator respectively (improved form above the old form):

Definitely! Under 25x25, let alone 35x35 or 50x50. I'll have to think for a while to figure out how best to use this to make a stable glider-to-Herschel converter, but I suspect that the Snark can significantly shrink most signal-converter technology.

About the only untouched corner of Life signal circuitry will be self-constructing circuits -- at least until someone comes up with a really efficient glider construction of (some variant of) that still life...?

In any case: heartiest congratulations! It has taken an impressive amount of thimbles and care and forks and hope, not to mention railway-shares, to get to this point -- and it will take quite a bit more time even to scratch the surface of what these Snarks can do.

igblan wrote:Here's a truly ugly G->H converter, based on the old G->B6+R converter, using the new reflector...Unfortunately, the smaller G->B6+H converter used in the Silver reflector yields a glider of the wrong colour from an additional F117.

You can bring a glider around to the other side of the G->B6+R, but that won't set any records:

At least there's the option of a quick 180-degree output from this one.

Anyway, lots of other cleanup options to try; there's a large accumulation of frustratingly-close-to-working converters out there that just need a spare glider bounced in from somewhere. I'm particularly interested in seeing how much Herschel-to-spaceship and spaceship-to-Herschel converters can be reduced --!

Edit: Calcyman has pointed out that G->B6+H + L156 is much faster than known G-to-H converters, at 386 ticks (left, below). On the right is G->B6+R + R64, which needs only one Snark and is mostly made out of blocks -- but its recovery time is 605 ticks.

Adding two boat reflectors and a block permits the easy destruction of the Snark by a single glider. The block can be removed to allow the escaping glider to start further destruction elsewhere in a larger pattern.

Woohoo! Congratulations! This is the most exciting result I've seen in a long time. And it's not only small enough to enter by hand, it's probably small enough to memorize with a little effort.

I'd like a link to send to people who are less involved in Game of Life and don't have something like Golly installed. If I were still maintaining my web page, I'd just add a link to run in the applet, but is there any more recent alternative? (other than YouTube, though that's one option).

One question that comes to mind is whether the big catalyst has a glider synthesis. If so, it could be used in puffers, but it would also prove the "naturalness" of this reflector.

Another more immediate question is whether it is possible to tickle an extra glider out of this. I sort of doubt it, but it might be worth trying.

I'm a bit of an amateur at glider circuitry and what-not, but below is my first attempt at a true p59 glider gun based on the one by Adam P. Goucher with Jason Summers using the new Snark. It's still pretty big but over 14 times smaller than the original. Further optimization is inevitable:

For example, I'm fairly certain that it can be made from the second smaller object below it. This 22-bit object, in turn, has enough "tails" and "hooks" on it so that it also could be built up incrementally. One possible starting point might be to build this from the 14-bit object at the bottom left. The 17-bit object (bottom right) represents another possible start.

It's been years since I've really done much construction, so my memory can be faulty, and I need to dig through my construction database to be sure about all this. On the other hand, this might give some people hints and ideas on how to proceed.

pcallahan wrote:Another more immediate question is whether it is possible to tickle an extra glider out of this. I sort of doubt it, but it might be worth trying.

This might be worth a try, but there is so little room for sparkers or other still lifes that I don't expect much to come of it. On a related note, it might be possible to coax an extra glider out of this p52 reflector by replacing the eater 3 and other still life with p4 sparkers:

Here's an idea that might have more promise. A while back I noticed that crashing a glider into one of Mike Playle's honeyfarm-to-glider reactions caused the honeyfarm to reappear in the same location. This could be repeated at period 26. I tested similar reactions and also found a period-31 reflector:

Long before this, Jason Summers found several honeyfarm hasslers that work in a similar manner and are supported by sparks. Perhaps by starting with the honeyfarm + eater --> glider + junk reaction, it would be possible to get the honeyfarm to reappear in the same place using sparkers and still lifes, thus creating a gun. It would be good to also try starting with two honeyfarm + eater reactions rotated 180-degrees relative to each other e.g. like this:

What's missing is any kind of description of how it works, the input file format, etc. I'll try and write some more about it over the next few days.

I've also decided that I'd like to continue the tradition by offering a prize of my own, to encourage further advances.

So I'll offer 100 USD for a colour-changing reflector. My reflector preserves the colour of the input glider, but I'm sure it's possible to find a similarly sized reflector which inverts the glider's colour. To be explicit, the reflector must fit in a 25x25 bounding box, and have a repeat time of 50 generations or less.

Looks like it's also possible to connect the glider outputs to different glider inputs -- it might be worth avoiding the nested loops.

...Yes, a color-changing Snark would be nice to have. It seems that adding more of this sort of Snark won't allow you to change a glider stream's phase mod 4 or mod 8. Depending on the situation, that kind of phase adjustment capability can come in pretty handy. Or maybe I should just be wishing for a small stable inline +1 or -1 rephaser --!

Here's a variable glider gun i made using snarks. It has a period 639+8n (the p639 example below is smaller by bounding box than the current p639 glider gun in Jason Summers' collection). Moving the two snarks at the SW corner n cells to the SW will increase the period 8n generations. At p663, two more signals can be added to make a p221 glider gun (also in the example).

That's another way of triggering the same honey farm explosion. I haven't tried searching that one. It's certainly worth looking at (and there are others, too - I'll try and remember to post my collection later).

calcyman wrote:Visual C++ Studio refuses to compile, throwing tons of errors. Do you have a 64-bit Windows executable?

Hmm. I just tried building it with a C++ compiler, and yeah, I see what you mean.

I don't have access to a Windows machine at the moment, but I seem to remember it's not very easy to tell the MS tools to compile stuff as C rather than C++. I'll have a go at fixing it up to build as C++ - maybe this will get it going for you.

I've built a few trial Herschel-to-spaceship converters. These are prototypes based on an initial round of Hersrch searches, so they're unlikely to be optimal. I didn't find anything smaller that uses the spare glider from the L156.

As with Herschel splitters, a H-to-LWSS converter with 62-tick recovery time should be possible, at the cost of a larger bounding box and many more Snarks.

The first H-to-MWSS I tried looks a little better, but has its own problems with recovery time. The output MWSS has to cross the path of the Snark-chain glider in a couple of places, so there's lots of room for improvement here, too: